Ricky Henderson, RIP

He was the greatest leadoff hitter of all time.

Journalists take a lot of vacation time around Christmas, so the news media winds up in late December dominated by pre-canned looks back at the year and by obituaries, which are usually pre-written at the big newspapers.

Somebody I didn’t expect to have to write an obituary for soon was baseball player Ricky Henderson, who has died just before his 66th birthday. Sure, the stolen base king started his career in 1979 and set the all time single season record with 130 in 1982, but he played as recently as 2003 at age 44.

Henderson was the greatest leadoff man in the history of baseball.

Scoring runs is the single most fundamental task to winning baseball games, and Henderson scored the most runs ever, 2,295 across 25 seasons. Even the most casual baseball fan is likely to recognize most of the guys who came closest to his mark: Ty Cobb, Barry Bonds, Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth, Pete Rose, Willie Mays, and Alex Rodriguez.

He was second in walks all-time to Bonds, ahead of third place Ruth and fourth place Ted Williams (good company to keep).

He only batted .279 (it didn’t help to play much of his prime in the Oakland Coliseum, a low-batting average ballpark with lots of room for foul-outs), but his on-base percentage was .401. Among active players, only Juan Soto, Mike Trout, and Aaron Judge are over .400.

Not a big man at 5’10” and 180, but Henderson had good power, hitting as many as 28 homers in a season (twice), so pitchers had to aim for the corners of the plate. He crouched low to shrink the top of his strike zone:

He stole 1,406 bases, far more than second place Lou Brock with 938.

Weaknesses?

He didn’t have a strong throwing arm, so, like Barry Bonds, he played the easier left field position rather than center field. But he was a very good leftfielder up into his early 30s.

He only hit 66 triples in his career, never more than 7 in one season.

Graph by John Walsh

That’s extraordinarily few for an all-time speedster with the kind of good but not great power that leads to a lot of balls hit over outfielders heads but still in the ballpark.

But he was a right-hander, playing on grass in Oakland’s symmetrical ballpark. And he wasn’t that fast coming out of his deep crouch. Plus, a few have recalled that Ricky sometimes liked to pause to admire Rickey’s rips before taking off running.

Was he a good teammate? Ricky was entertainingly egomaniacal, saying things like, “Rickey don't like it when Rickey can't find Rickey's limo.” The famous story that Rickey told John Olerud that he used to have a teammate just like him in wearing a batter’s helmet on the field, and Olerud replied, “Yeah, Rickey, that was me,” was probably concocted. Still, Rickey was Rickey.

Henderson was the opposite of his contemporary Cal Ripken, who played in 2,632 straight games for the Baltimore Orioles. Sliding hard into second base while the fielder slammed home the tag took a toll: Ricky generally missed 10 to 20 games per season. Then again, he was a major leaguer for a huge 25 seasons, from age 20 through 44.

Henderson played for 9 teams: no Hall of Famer has played for more. Nine is especially a lot for an inner circle Hall of Famer. (But the heart of his career consisted of 14 seasons in Oakland, in three shifts, and five with the Yankees.)

And he seems to have been popular with other players, who presumably felt that he’d more than earned his eccentricities.

Was Ricky juicing on steroids?

Most of his great years were before steroid use exploded (which was roughly from 1993 onward)

He did lead the American League in 1998 at Oakland with 66 stolen bases at age 39. That was the year when America went nuts over obvious juicers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, so I wouldn’t blame him too much if he did.

What about his MVP year of 1990 at Oakland, where Jose Canseco was the main man? Maybe. Yet, interestingly, Canseco, in his informative 2005 memoir Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big lists Ricky and Bo Jackson as two legends he’s sure didn’t use steroids.

What about 1985, when Ricky won Don Mattingly the MVP award for driving in 145 runs by scoring 146 in just 143 games? Nobody else appears to have averaged one run scored per game since the high-scoring 1930s.

Or in 1982 when he stole 130 bases?

Even less likely.

It’s an interesting question. Henderson appears to have been the fourth best left-fielder, behind Barry Bonds, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams, but the first best leadoff man.